Flattening Water Stones

Re: Flattening Water Stones

Bruce, a MN galoot

>Try drywall sanding screen. Works good. Relatively cheap.

Bruce

Re: Flattening Water Stones - cheap!

CONGER - The Irish diaspora in Munich

>The drywall is cheap.

I went to my local stone mason (I live near several 'up-market'(?) graveyards) and the mason was glad to have me take some off-cuts of granite and marble from his skip (saved him money!). These are great and 'solid as a rock'... and when they wear out(?) there are more where they came from.

To mis-quote Brendan Behan - 'there are people dying nowadays, who could never have afforded to before'.

-g-

Re: Flattening Water Stones

Victor Parisian - Houston

>Ok, the discussion is flattening waterstones. I've been rubbing mine against each other under running water with some success. What are the rest of you doing? Techniques that are quick and effective please.

Victor - Sitting in Houston early in the morning thinking we ducked Ivan again and wanting to go to the shop for a few minutes before I run out the door to work.

Re: Flattening Water Stones

Rossmoor Galoot

>Victor,

I was taught your method also and use it for normal stone maintenance. I lately found, however, that my coarser stones were slightly dished and flattened them using drywall screen on top of sandpaper. It was quick and easy albeit messy. I still think I'll use the stones against each other normally and the drywall screen method when necessary.

Two-stone Troubles

Christopher Schwarz

>The problem with rubbing two stones together to true them is there's no guarantee that you've greated two flat surfaces. One could be concave and the other one sypathetically convex. It will seem like they are true, but they are not.

You either need three stones so you can test them against one another, or you need a flat reference surface. Float glass, DMT, grainte plate, cast iron, whatever. And you need an abrasive: wet/dry sandpaper, the DMT etc.

Chris

Re: Two-stone Troubles

Victor Parisian - Houston

>Thanks for the replys Guys.

How about a large scrap of MDF and 220 grit sanding paper held in place with a mist of water? I have both on hand. Do you see any problem with this? I reason that if the Mdf gets soaked and starts to get rough I can turn it over for one more use and after that throw it away (where it was going anyway).

DMT?? I should know this. Not senior enough for senior moments, more like a brain f*rt.

Victor (Just goofing off. Now back to the work.)

Re: Flattening Water Stones

Tony - Memphis

>I flattened my Nortons for the first time recently. I just used sandpaper on glass with water. Went amazingly quick and easy.

Tony

Re: Two-stone Troubles

steve knight

>if you do it right you can do it. but you can't just rub them together. you need to use one always to flatten only. you need to use the middle of the stone more then the ends. so you turn it sideways and work the higher parts of the stone you sharpen with. this is how most of the japanese flatten their stones. it works fine but you need to know how to do it.

Re: Flattening Water Stones

steve knight

>you can flatten a shapton stone with drywall screen but you only get about one flattening per sheet. they are so hard that you really need another method to flatten them. Here i was using the other brand of stones and I finally deside to get the sanding screen. well as soon as I get it from ebay I find the shapton stones and it is useless (G)

Me too!

Scott Burr in Ben Lomond CA

>They work fantastic. One will flatten a quite a few stones. Very quickly too.

Re: Two-stone Troubles

Don Thompson - Cutler Ridge, Florida

>Rubbing two waterstones together reminds me too much of the method we used to make lenses for telescopes in astronomy club when I was a kid. Real easy to make one convex and the other concave. (the hard part was to make the curve parabolic)